I will NEVER understand how the birthday party could be viewed as funny by anyone with some degree of empathy. It was a deeply disturbing scene, very appropiately done from Pepper and Rhodey point of view, featuring their dear friend drunk off his ass, publicly making a fool of himself, handling a dangerous weapon and refusing to come down. This was not in the film for laughs, the fact that some people thought otherwise is baffling to me .

Yes the scene as a whole was meant to be an intense, dramatic scene, but as these are family films, they can never really go fully into such drama. There were definitely moments within the scene done for laughs to offset the darker nature of the scene.